Utah County GOP unhappy with party bosses

Used to be that the Salt Lake County Republican Party was the one known for dissatisfied grass-roots members. But lately, the Utah County Republican Party has joined that group.

After all, I remember when Salt Lake GOP bosses got a former U.S. congressional GOP candidate arrested for trespassing at the Salt Lake GOP convention. And later, Salt Lake bosses also took away some of their local party officeholders' positions after they endorsed a Democrat for office.

And I won't even mention one former (he's been banned from the party) Salt Lake Republican who keeps getting arrested for crashing party functions.

But now it's Utah County Republicans who are unhappy with their own party bosses.

The 2008 elections saw all kinds of shenanigans in Utah County GOP politics. I won't list them all here. Reforms were promised by a new slew of candidates for county party posts. But Utah County Republicans couldn't even get along at their recent county convention. Complaints were made about how the ballots were counted and who was let into the counting room.

The wife of Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert, Jeanette Herbert, was barred from the counting room because, leaders said, she was not a delegate herself to the convention. Jeanette Herbert said she was the official vote-count observer for one of the party leadership candidates.

And in some cases, it appears, candidates for the state GOP central committee from Utah County were, themselves, allowed to count ballots for their own offices.

Political parties are, for the most part, volunteer organizations. And it is not unheard of to have cliques evolve among those with the time and heart to run local political parties.

Sometimes, those who invest so much into those local parties take "ownership," if you will, of those organizations.

And human nature being what it is, those outside of those cliques feel ostracized, and those inside circle the wagons when complaints are made against them.

The answer, of course, is a cleansing turnover of political leaders — just like other government/political organizations need tilling to bring up healthy new shoots. Hopefully, the new leadership teams in the Salt Lake and Utah county GOP operations will find a way to heal old wounds and move their organizations forward.